Tagged: Don Giovanni

When I was first getting into opera, Ruggero Raimondi was my guide, at first without my really realizing it. In the beginning I wasn’t paying much attention to the names on the CD covers, but once I started paying attention I realized he was on all my favourite recordings. I started off with Puccini, and Raimondi was there on the 1979 Carreras/Ricciarelli Tosca, as the smoothest evilest Scarpia out there. Then I moved on to Mozart, and Raimondi was there as a chocolate-tongued Don Giovanni and a Count Almaviva with gravitas. Then I started getting into the Russian rep and Raimondi was there in the Russianest opera of them all, Boris Godunov. Then I was interested in Rossini and Raimondi was there again in a variety of comic roles.

Here’s an interesting Opera News interview with the COC’s General Director, Alexander Neef. The article takes particular note of his youth, suggesting it might help him attract younger audiences to opera (was he the one responsible for choosing the hipper-than-thou Drake Hotel to host the Opera 101 night a few weeks ago?).

Of particular interest is his praise for the openness of Toronto opera audiences:

What’s really interesting about the public here — and this is something I like a lot — is that people are very open to things that they didn’t know before, and they give you a chance to convince them that it’s actually good to do it. They just come in, sit down and build an opinion. They’re not opinionated before they come in. It gives us a lot of freedom in programming. Last season, our ’08–09 season, consisted of War and Peace, Don Giovanni, Fidelio, Rusalka, Bohème, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Simon Boccanegra. Apart from War and Peace, which was everybody’s favorite, we got the most feedback for Rusalka and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Those were the productions and pieces that everybody really got excited about. I thought that was really interesting.

It might be possible to read those first few sentences as slightly condescending – Toronto audiences don’t care what you put in front of them; just put it on the program and they’ll always listen politely. But it’s true that in Toronto, the seats fill up just as quickly for War and Peace as they do for La Boheme. When I was a regular attendee at Edmonton Opera, they would sometimes make an effort to mount less well-known, more challenging works, like The Rake’s Progress, the Lapage Bluebeard’s Castle/Erwartung, and the homegrown Filumena. There would be plenty of empty seats in the theatre those nights, and a small exodus at intermission. Occasionally there would even be an angry letter to the newspaper accusing EO of abandoning its base.

It’s great that the COC is willing to not only include operas like War & Peace in its programming, but put its full weight and resources behind them. The three operas he mentions were indeed the most memorable for me that year.